BILL FISHER: My name is Bill Fisher and I’m one of the sons of Don and Doris Fisher. In front of you is hanging the Fish. Which is a very, very important piece in my parents’ collection, probably starting with the fact that our name is Fisher, and so from early on growing up, my parents collected a lot of things that were associated to that name; this piece certainly being the most iconic in their collection. It hung in their dining room. And my parents, they were hugely fond of Alexander Calder. They had a collection that was quite large because they just loved the whimsy, the way that he made these works.

The Fish was made in the 50s, although they bought the piece many years later, and by the 2000s, it was quite dark and the paint had come off. We brought it to Jim Bernstein who is a conservator, and he spent two years working with the Calder Foundation to bring that piece back to its original look. A lot of the paint had flecked off over the years and because the pollution and everything else, the work had darkened.  The other thing he did is that many of the glass pieces had been reattached with wire, and the problem with wire is that it doesn’t turn and it doesn’t move, which kind of defeats the purpose of the types of work that Calder did. He loves the idea of movement and air, and so he replaced those wires with twine. And so the piece looks quite different from when it hung in my parents’ dining room. Frankly, I think it looks better and it has been brought back to its original look.

My parents loved anything that Alexander Calder did, from the small hand done works like the Aquarium, to the Mobiles. I think the engineering of them was really something that my father personally could relate to. He was very mathematical in how he approached business and I think in many ways the world, and this totally played into his analytic look at things.